3.0: failed or not?

[Nagashsnee]

15 hours ago, Orodhen said:

I think it's safe to say that Alan Bligh was a big reason early Heresy was like that. You could tell there was a lot of love and passion put into them. They weren't perfect or balanced, but they were very enjoyable books.

 

Without him, it's returning to normal corpo-slop content.

But why? He had a team, his method brought results, the fans loved it and the game sold well enough in resin to tranfer it to plastic. Why immidiatly start distancing away from the clearly working model?

 

Alan was great at his job, but they could surely hire/promote to cover the gap and carry on what was working. I will never understand the mindset of 'the game has gone great, a community has formed, sales are so high we have began casting sprues in plastic, now lets move AWAY from the system so far and do what ALL OUR OTHER GAMES ALREADY DO''.

 

Even today the black book re sale price is insane, while the 2edition books...well they are still worth something at least.  They had a winning formula why run away from it?

 

I wont belive no one else has passion, or they are fundamentaly incapable of doing it. I would just like to know the actual reason? Cost/profit? Suits couldnt be bothered? Part of taking FW apart?

Edited March 6 by Nagashsnee

[Brofist]

Its hard to say for sure without working there. That said, if its anything like the digital games business, its because GW is run by suits. Business decisions don't have to make sense. It just has to make sense to the people in charge. People at that level making those decisions rarely even touch the products they manage, let alone play games.

[Pacific81]

After playing a few games (and enough to form an opinion) I would say a strong, central project manager or designer is exactly what the edition is missing. It's impossible to say for sure as GW no longer credits its creatives, but the evidence for me is in how many contradictory styles of mechanics are in the game. As an example, some areas are extremely abstract - the terrain rules, damage & casualty management, all designed to speed up play. But then on the other hand you have incredibly crunchy & complex systems more at home in a skirmish game (I had one melee combat with challenge that took almost 30 minutes to complete because of mixed weapon loadouts), things like the split psychology stats and reactions, which for me are absolutely nuts in a mass combat game.

So I would say you had probably 2 or 3 designers pulling in different directions, too many cooks, they compromised and then you are left with a bit of a stew. It needed a 'Gordon Ramsay' to tell people to F-off! 

Edited March 6 by Pacific81
Typo

[Irate Khornate]

That lines up with most of the sentiment. This game edition was cobbled together from 3 separate designers and had no central oversight other than to run the book through an ai program to check the grammar.

 

From my understanding 30k isn't the only victim of the suits. AOS I believe is in the same boat and losing popularity as a result. Could be wrong though, but I know the local community has pretty much died as well. 

[Brother Sutek]

Losing focus can usually be attributed to a new boss with either the want to make their own mark, appease the powers that be or incompetence.  At a job I used to have it was due to a senior manager leaving for greener pastures and a newer manager being promoted to his position.  The senior has enough clout to be able to fight for his programs and plans but the new one was unable to leverage the ideas that they had. Also the new one really wanted to make her mark and not just be our old bosses shadow. It didn't turn out well for us and I left the job for greener pastures as well. Alan wasn't perfect but without the strong arm on the rudder we got a diluted game IMO.  

[DuskRaider]

It’s the 40kification of 30K. They wanted all lines to share a similar design style, from layout to gameplay. It happened to Fantasy, it happened with 40K from 8th Edition on and 30K was dragged down into it as well from 2nd edition to current. GW was in dire straits financially at this point and made some drastic changes which, if we’re being honest, saved the company. It also ended up streamlining the game systems to a high degree, push out a lot of old players and actively recruit new younger players.
 

I don’t need to tell anyone my thoughts on 8th and on, I’ve stated it before many many times. Seeing my beloved 30K suffer the same fate has been demoralizing, to say the least. 

Edited March 7 by DuskRaider
Spelling

[MARK0SIAN]

It feels like a lot of my gripes with the change to 3.0 can generally be summed up with:

 

“but who was asking for this?”

 

I don’t hate all the changes by any means but some stuff just seems like it was trying to solve a problem that wasn’t really a problem or was just introducing something that no one was asking for. 
 

They talked, for example, about how no one was taking regular centurions before and that was generally true. But was that honestly a problem? The plethora of wargear choices meant that even if you had made and painted an awesome centurion model it could easily stand in for almost any other HQ.

 

People weren’t using pistols? Again, was that really an issue? Most models weren’t equipped with anything interesting in terms of pistols anyway. It certainly didn’t warrant adding in a second shooting phase to the game so people would use them. 
 

Challenges certainly had issues but that was largely down to being able to play silly games with chosen warriors/sergeants and the fact wounds didn’t spill out of challenges. I don’t think I ever heard anyone ask for the challenge phase to be turned into such a complex and time consuming mini game. 

I’ve already made my thoughts on the army building system clear but honestly, who was asking for this current system? 
 

It just feels like, although the designers did identify lots of areas that needed improvement, they also seem to have plucked some out of some fever dream they had.

[Razorblade]

There's also a clear "throw everything at the game and see what sticks"-approach at play here. 

Which is perfectly fine for a first draft that is going to get proof-read and playtested, but that obviously didn't happen here.

[Stitch5000]

11 hours ago, Razorblade said:

Which is perfectly fine for a first draft that is going to get proof-read and playtested, but that obviously didn't happen here.

The dozen or so people claiming to be playtesters at the last WHW event beg to differ. 

[MARK0SIAN]

Playtesting and GW has always been a mystery. They seem to do it but an awful lot of stuff slips through that never should, including for the flagship 40k game. The pinnacle surely has to be the initial Votann codex which had supposedly been playtested but then had to be nerfed before it was even released after a lot of feedback from the initial previews. 
 

It makes you think that the playtesting must be very casual, it can’t be a rigorous look at the rules. Or they do it too late in the development cycle for the feedback to be properly incorporated. 
 

The other element with any kind of playtesting is it tends to be carried out by people who are heavily involved in the game. Even if they don’t work for GW they live and breathe the game to an extent that most us can’t begin to match so I think they’re very often missing the “what will this be like for a casual player?” perspective. 

[Razorblade]

3 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

The dozen or so people claiming to be playtesters at the last WHW event beg to differ. 

A lot to unpack here: 

1. A dozen or so people claiming to be anything is not exactly verifiable proof.

2. Even if that dozen or so people were playtesters that does not mean they were remotely qualified for that job. 

3. Even if they got a dozen decent playtestesters, that is hardly enough to thoroughly playtest every aspect of a game of this size. 

4. Even if they had a sufficient number of playtesters to do a decently thorough job. If those playtesters came in late in the process, which is almost certainly the case, there would not have been time to make changes to all of the many, many new rules one may have found issues with.

31 minutes ago, MARK0SIAN said:

Playtesting and GW has always been a mystery. They seem to do it but an awful lot of stuff slips through that never should, including for the flagship 40k game. The pinnacle surely has to be the initial Votann codex which had supposedly been playtested but then had to be nerfed before it was even released after a lot of feedback from the initial previews. 
 

It makes you think that the playtesting must be very casual, it can’t be a rigorous look at the rules. Or they do it too late in the development cycle for the feedback to be properly incorporated. 
 

The other element with any kind of playtesting is it tends to be carried out by people who are heavily involved in the game. Even if they don’t work for GW they live and breathe the game to an extent that most us can’t begin to match so I think they’re very often missing the “what will this be like for a casual player?” perspective. 

I think 40k has decent playtesting these days, the slips become rare and are always limited to specific factions or units, not fundamental game mechanics. Certainly not enough to cover every unit among every matchup and faction but I'm convinced there is playtesting by people who know what they're doing. 

 

Specialist games, including 30k, on the other hand I'm pretty sure do not receive playtesting from anyone but the writers and maybe some of their buddies at warhammer world, at least not until shortly before release (when it is too late to implement sweeping changes). Which is terrible because these people not only aren't the best players available they are also inherently biased towards their own rules. 

 

I really think they should just let the best 40k players test everything. If they can't break it, neither can casual players.

[Stitch5000]

1 hour ago, MARK0SIAN said:

Playtesting and GW has always been a mystery.

It really isn't that mysterious.  I playtested some stuff for HH1 about 10 years years ago when I moved to Nottingham and I joined a gaming group that did some playtesting. 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

1. A dozen or so people claiming to be anything is not exactly verifiable proof.

I have no reason to doubt them. Kinda a weird thing to claim if it isn;t true... I mean, you're not going to get much praise, right?

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

2. Even if that dozen or so people were playtesters that does not mean they were remotely qualified for that job. 

What criteria would you lay down as a qualifier? (The guys in question all placed well in the event by scoring well and also getting lots of favourite game votes... They seemed to be pretty much examplars of the gaming side of the hobby.

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

3. Even if they got a dozen decent playtestesters, that is hardly enough to thoroughly playtest every aspect of a game of this size.

Nobody at any point intimated that they were the extent of the playtesters. 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

4. Even if they had a sufficient number of playtesters to do a decently thorough job. If those playtesters came in late in the process, which is almost certainly the case, there would not have been time to make changes to all of the many, many new rules one may have found issues with.

Why is this "almost certainly the case"?

[MARK0SIAN]

57 minutes ago, Stitch5000 said:

It really isn't that mysterious.  I playtested some stuff for HH1 about 10 years years ago when I moved to Nottingham and I joined a gaming group that did some playtesting. 

Saying it’s not mysterious to you when you’ve been involved in it is like the commander of Area 51 saying I don’t find anything mysterious about what’s going on in the base. 
 

I exaggerate obviously but you’re obviously not going to find it a mystery how they go about it if you’ve done it, but for the rest of us we’ve got no clue how they do the playtesting so it’s pretty mysterious what the process involves.

[Stitch5000]

11 minutes ago, MARK0SIAN said:

Saying it’s not mysterious to you when you’ve been involved in it is like the commander of Area 51 saying I don’t find anything mysterious about what’s going on in the base. 
 

I exaggerate obviously but you’re obviously not going to find it a mystery how they go about it if you’ve done it, but for the rest of us we’ve got no clue how they do the playtesting so it’s pretty mysterious what the process involves.

Fair point... I'm going back a decade with this, however I was simply involved in a gaming group that was able to play games in a private setting, I signed an NDA and from that point on I was copied in on a distribution list of playtest rules (in "raw text" formats, I might add). We were instructed to give feedback based primarily on playing games rather than theorising outcomes. This lasted about 6 months before our group was disbanded due to no longer having access to a private space frequently enough to provide useful feedback.

Some of the rules we tested in that time made it in to books, others were never published, to my knowledge. 

It wasn't clandestine or cloak-and-dagger nobody had to go through any arcane initiations or anything. 

[Brofist]

7 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

What criteria would you lay down as a qualifier? (The guys in question all placed well in the event by scoring well and also getting lots of favourite game votes... They seemed to be pretty much examplars of the gaming side of the hobby.

 

I know this is ultimately irrelevant, but there are large companies that specialize in sourcing testers, gathering feedback, and organizing testing for products ranging from hamburgers to video games.

[Razorblade]

7 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

I have no reason to doubt them. Kinda a weird thing to claim if it isn;t true... I mean, you're not going to get much praise, right?

Because weird nerds make up weird lies to brag about weird things. Not saying that's the case necessarily but some dude saying he got to playtest isn't proof of anything.

7 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

What criteria would you lay down as a qualifier? (The guys in question all placed well in the event by scoring well and also getting lots of favourite game votes...

Consistently placing high in events for games that have an actual competitive scene, ideally across multiple systems, ideally as different as possible.

7 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

Nobody at any point intimated that they were the extent of the playtesters. 

Yeah, nobody can proof that there were more either, can they? 

 

7 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

Why is this "almost certainly the case"?

I would say the product speaks for itself, but really, the lack of leaks. There were leaked playtesting documents for 2.0 I think half a year-ish before the release, and the early-access copies of 3.0 leaked immediately. I do not believe that GW was running an adequate amount of playtesting in what would have realistically had to be 2023, or somebody would have gotten wind of it, especially if the playtesters would have been regular 30k players, given the divisiveness of the rules.

[Pacific81]

AFAIK Epic Armageddon was GW's only publicly playtested game, it's also I think their most well balanced and tournament-suitable game.

 

The new Mantic Epic Warpath game has got upwards of 50 names of playtesters listed inside the rulebook, again early reports are that it works nicely.

 

So perhaps its a case not of any playtesting taking place at all (obviously there would have been some, even with a mega corp like GW having to stop espionage) but how widely you distribute the rules and give people an opportunity to give feedback.

 

I will say though I haven't come across anything in HH 3.0 as egregious as Legions Imp, which had some faction & other rules which were hilariously broken and became apparent immediately, implying those areas at least had not been playtested. 

[TheTrans]

If I was a playtester for the most divisive and derided release of HH I wouldn't be saying I was involved haha. 

[Irate Khornate]

We also have to remember that era of time where GW had the YouTubers and other influencers doing play testing for 8th and 9th edition 40K and wound up ignoring a LOT of the feedback they received because broken rules sell more models.

 

Play testing at this point means next to nothing when it's already been proven they will ignore feedback. 

 

Plus play testers don't receive the finalized version. They might have actually received a coherent set of rules!

[Stitch5000]

11 hours ago, Razorblade said:

Not saying that's the case necessarily

Well, then probably stop saying that?

11 hours ago, Razorblade said:

Consistently placing high in events for games that have an actual competitive scene, ideally across multiple systems, ideally as different as possible.

These guys seem to fit the bill pretty well in that case.

 

11 hours ago, Razorblade said:

Yeah, nobody can proof that there were more either, can they? 

We're either accepting they are playtesters or not? 

11 hours ago, Razorblade said:

would say the product speaks for itself, but really, the lack of leaks. There were leaked playtesting documents for 2.0 I think half a year-ish before the release, and the early-access copies of 3.0 leaked immediately. I do not believe that GW was running an adequate amount of playtesting in what would have realistically had to be 2023, or somebody would have gotten wind of it, especially if the playtesters would have been regular 30k players, given the divisiveness of the rules.

Integrity is a thing, right? From the above mentioned experience of being a playtester, the propensity to leak stuff is an immediate disqualifier. Is it so hard to believe that somebody (in fact several people) trustworthy and willing to abide by a legally-binding document would be so hard to find?

[Razorblade]

4 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

Well, then probably stop saying that?

Now why on earth would I do that?

 

4 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

These guys seem to fit the bill pretty well in that case.

In that case it should be no issue at all to share their player tags so we can verify that?

4 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

We're either accepting they are playtesters or not? 

I'm not accepting anything, I think you're just making stuff up, but even if you weren't that wouldn’t change my point? 

4 hours ago, Stitch5000 said:

Integrity is a thing, right? From the above mentioned experience of being a playtester, the propensity to leak stuff is an immediate disqualifier. Is it so hard to believe that somebody (in fact several people) trustworthy and willing to abide by a legally-binding document would be so hard to find?

It is very hard to believe that a company notorious for their leaks could recruit what would have to be dozens of people over several years without word of recruitment process at the very least getting out. No NDAs would need to be violated for that either.

Now I'm sure you'll just now remember that your aunts son-in-law mentioned being recruited all the way back in 22 or something?

[Brofist]

Our post-event survey results are in. Some interesting qualitative data regarding this topic:

• People played way less games than before. Only 44% of players played 4 or more games this year, compared to 70% of players in 2025. Clear signal of new edition blues.
• People want to play less of the new edition. Only 33% of players want to play more than 3 games each day in 2026 compared to 77% of players in 2025. Another signal of new edition blues or points bloat slowing down games.
• Despite conversations about players feeling like the new edition blues had thawed, this wasn't supported by the survey. The number of players who want to play 3.0 barely increased. Instead, the number of players who wanted to play 2.0 actually increased. 73% of players want to stick with 3.0 and 27% would prefer 2.0 in 2026 compared to 72% / 22% in 2025. Another signal that this is a divisive edition and players are entrenched in what they like or don't.

Edited March 16 by Brofist

[Brother Sutek]

That depressing news, just because I don't like something I still hope others will. I still play 40k but an older edition, it's always unfortunate when I hear of the issues the newer edition have because I want other people to enjoy their games. I can only say I'd like to be able to play any Horus Heresy games because 3rd edition killed the scene completely.  I don't even know if it's any good from personal experience as I was never able to get a game. Dark times.

[Shard of Magnus]

@Brofist Regarding your second bullet…any observations on differences in game time between this year and last?

I feel like my casual HH3 games are still taking slightly longer than in HH2 right now but haven’t played close attention. The first ~6 months was a much more significant impact due to all the changes, more so considering only going 4 turns.

[No Foes Remain]

14 hours ago, Brofist said:

Our post-event survey results are in. Some interesting qualitative data regarding this topic:

• People played way less games than before. Only 44% of players played 4 or more games this year, compared to 70% of players in 2025. Clear signal of new edition blues.
• People want to play less of the new edition. Only 33% of players want to play more than 3 games each day in 2026 compared to 77% of players in 2025. Another signal of new edition blues or points bloat slowing down games.
• Despite conversations about players feeling like the new edition blues had thawed, this wasn't supported by the survey. The number of players who want to play 3.0 barely increased. Instead, the number of players who wanted to play 2.0 actually increased. 73% of players want to stick with 3.0 and 27% would prefer 2.0 in 2026 compared to 72% / 22% in 2025. Another signal that this is a divisive edition and players are entrenched in what they like or don't.

Did any express any interest in playing 1.0 or was just 2.0 mentioned? And is that something that would be taken account for in future events?